In general, a workflow is defined as a whole or partial business process for transmitting documents, information or activities from one participant to another participant according to a series of procedures or rules. A workflow system is an automatic system for collectively managing workflows.
Exemplary business processes include insurance contract service works of an insurance company, delivery service works of a delivery company and loan service works of a bank. The workflow system interprets and embodies the business process composed of relations and flows between resources relating to daily works of an organization, so that people can work by using the business process. It is called process execution.
The insurance contract service works will now be explained in detail with reference to FIG. 1. The business process has sequential steps of client order acceptance, contract document preparation, and prepared document approval. In the insurance contract service works, the order acceptance, document preparation and document approval works are respectively unit activities of the workflow. The unit activity of the workflow which is a minimum logical unit composing the process includes human beings, resources and information.
When an insurance contract order is accepted, a process generated according to the process definition is an instance. Therefore, a plurality of instances exist in one process definition. When the instance is performed and ended, information relating to the process instance is stored in an archive.
The workflow system generally provides a function of searching, analyzing or evaluating a process and a person working in the process, including a start time, an end time, a person in charge, a person delaying work, an overdue work, and a time consumed to perform the whole process. Such functions of the workflow system serve to embody economical techniques such as the activity based management or the balanced score card.
However, the conventional workflow system can provide very basic functions for evaluating the activities or processes. As a result, there is a strong demand for an analysis method for measuring and evaluating results of the activity process by efficiently analyzing a lot of data accumulated during the workflow execution.